Shirley Ross won the University of Alberta’s Community Advocate Award Monday for her work at the university’s two-acre Green and Gold Community Garden.

A team of 100 volunteers grow more than 60 varieties of vegetables and sell them, with all proceeds going to the Tubahumurize Association in Rwanda to help women who have been traumatized by genocide and domestic abuse.

By Kevin Maimann
Metro
May 15 2017

Excerpt:

The garden is the association’s core source of funding and helps finance trauma counselling, health education, sewing and embroidery training and small business loans for the women.

“With the counselling programs that are provided, sometimes they’re speaking for the first time about their experience. They can be part of groups where they know that they’re not alone,” Ross said. “It helps them both socially but also economically.”

“People have asked me why my own front yard and I think why wouldn’t I? I have the real estate. I have the space and I have the time.”

By Kendra Lolio
Coventry Courier
May 8, 2017

Excerpt:

“I like to be busy and this is a good way to give back to the community,” said Whittinghill, a semi-retired kitchen and bath designer. The idea for the garden came in February, when she had been mulling over options for landscaping on the property, trying to figure out what to do with the front lawn. Her home, which she bought 10 years ago, is set back quite a ways from the street, leaving her with a quite expansive amount of space and no idea what to do with it.